2024 was a defining year in Drift’s journey towards realizing the vision of wealth generation for all, solidifying Drift’s path from a pure derivatives exchange to an all-in-one permissionless financial platform.

This year, Drift established a renewed vision, making the trading experience 10x faster for users while growing into a DeFi Super Protocol with trading, earning and vaults under one umbrella.

Drift shipped new core products and onboarded ecosystem teams to bring innovative financial opportunities to Drift users.

In 2024, Drift also raised its $25M Series B round to accelerate its vision, bringing total funding to $52.5M. 

2024 Milestones

• Grew to over $55B in cumulative trading volume and has since welcomed 200,000+ traders to the platform. 
• Daily transactions peaked at 13 million in February, demonstrating Drift’s ability to handle on-chain demand at scale.
• Drift surpassed $1 billion in daily trading volume post-TGE. 
• Open interest and deposits reached all-time highs, underscoring growing user confidence in the platform.

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Drift’s Vision Refresh

Drift’s vision is bold: enable every individual to build wealth through crypto — whether by earning, saving, or trading. 

Historically, building wealth through financial systems was an opportunity reserved for the elite 1%. Today, crypto and DeFi open the pathway for everyone to do the same. Over the next decade, the crypto economy is poised to expand to $30 trillion. 

Whether you have $100 or $10,000,000, you deserve a chance to share in this growth. 

This belief is at the heart of Drift. 

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Drift Always Ships – Expanding DeFi Utility 

Drift redefined what’s possible in DeFi by increasing opportunities for asset utilization, trading and yield generation. Drift is the largest DeFi derivatives platform that enables cross-collateral (not just USDC) and continuously shipped to ensure the best user experience. 

Perpetuals and Leverage Trading

Drift’s flagship product is its derivatives platform and every ship is geared towards improving the experience of Drift’s core users. Some of this year's highlights include: 

• Launched Lite Mode, a streamlined version of Drift designed for traders who prioritize speed and simplicity.
• Launched Pre-Launch Markets, enabling traders to gain exposure to highly anticipated projects and token launches
• High Leverage Mode for SOL, BTC and ETH which enables traders to trade with up to 50x leverage.
• Improved market order fills which enables traders to get better entry prices by using mark price as an anchor for auctions.
• Sophisticated tools like Scaled Orders, which enables traders to place multiple limit orders across a price range for more control and precision in market engagement.
• New stats page to give traders more insights of funding rates, liquidations and bankruptcies.
• Improved liquidation shields like flash crash protection and sensible oracle guardrails, ensuring that liquidations are slowed down over a short window when prices move fast. 
• Improved mobile experience for traders to trade as seamlessly as they would on desktop. 

Currently, Drift offers 50 perpetual markets supported by 30+ collaterals, including PENGU and ME which was listed on Day One of their launch. On average, over $6 billion in volume is traded on Drift every month. 

New DeFi Assets 

Drift integrated real-world assets (RWAs) like Ondo and introduced novel stablecoin-like primitives such as USDe. Liquid staking tokens like dSOL and BNSOL became available as collateral on Drift. New stablecoins like PayPal’s PYUSD and Sky Ecosystem’s USDS also launched with rewards for depositors.

The Launch of Earn

An accessible earn product is key to Drift’s vision — enabling anyone to earn high yield with one-click. Drift Earn consolidates borrow/lend, vaults, insurance staking funds, and Super Stake SOL offerings under one platform. This interface empowers users to compare yields across products and maximize their earning potential. 

Drift Vaults has become a cornerstone for Earn, offering users structured products tailored for diverse trading and yield strategies, and has amassed over $170 million in TVL.

By November, Drift saw an all-time high of $1 billion in deposits, with all deposits earning yield. USDC rates climbed as high as 66% during periods of high activity, proving that DeFi can outcompete traditional savings and investment products. 

The Launch of BET 

August saw the debut of BET, a capital-efficient prediction market tailored for US election predictions and other high-profile sports events. By utilising Drift’s borrow/lend engine, users can earn yield while waiting for their bets to mature – a feature unique to Drift. 

Within one week of being live, BET achieved $20 million in 24-hour volume. Post-elections, new markets like F1 and Super Bowl predictions drove continued engagement.

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Builders on Drift

The Drift ecosystem thrived in 2024, with over 30 teams actively building on top of Drift’s permissionless infrastructure. 

These partners are creating financial primitives and structured products that cater to diverse audiences, paving the way for Drift to scale to millions of users.

Hackathons and Innovation

Drift sponsored the DeFi track at the Radar Hackathon, where builders showcased their creativity by leveraging Drift’s core engines. Five Drift ecosystem teams won the Solana Radar Hackathon: Reflect, Hylo, Quartz, The Arena, and Neutral Trade.

Recently, the AskJimmy team brought AI agents to Drift. The team launched a delta-neutral strategy on Drift, powered by an AI agent which analyzes markets for opportunities while providing users with real-time updates. 

Drift Vaults

Drift Vaults emerged as the largest platform for structured products on Solana with over 20 high-yield, pro trading strategies where users can easily access by depositing the requisite asset. Drift Vaults is an audited program with an open-sourced SDK with multiple individual contributions.

Vaults include hedged JLP strategies by teams like Gauntlet and Vectis Finance, asset-specific hJLP strategies by Neutral Trade, and funding rate strategies by Elemental. 

Drift’s Borrow/Lend engine

Builders like Fuse and Lulo leveraged Drift’s borrow/lend engine to provide some of the highest USDC APYs in the market to their users. 

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Community and Governance

Drift Foundation and the DRIFT Governance Token Launch

The Drift Foundation launched the DRIFT governance token in May 2024 with a big airdrop event that rewarded believers and community members. 

In May, the Drift Foundation rewarded users for activity spanning from its 2021 launch up to the final points drop in April. 12% of DRIFT was distributed in the initial airdrop. The airdrop was carefully crafted to balance rewards between large liquidity providers and smaller retail users, ensuring a fair distribution of tokens. 

At the Token Generation Event (TGE), the Drift Foundation implemented a novel bonus claim system. Users who waited six hours after TGE to claim their tokens received 2x DRIFT rewards, reinforcing patient participation while limiting network congestion. Soon after TGE, users staked DRIFT in the Insurance Staking Fund and deposited DRIFT as collateral, leveraging Drift’s innovative cross-margining and cross-collateral engine. Currently, there are 11.5M DRIFT deposited into Drift and 15.5M DRIFT staked. 

Governance

The launch of DRIFT marked a significant step forward in decentralizing Drift and empowering the community with a voice in the protocol's development. The community participates in governance by staking DRIFT and voting on proposals. 

Since launch, there have been nine governance proposals to date: two through Realms and seven through MetaDAO. Governance is executed via a multi-pillar DAO design which consists of three branches of governance: 

• Voting DAO: Robust governance for major decisions
• Security Council: Operational efficiency
• Futarchy DAO: Efficient capital allocation

This design enables effective decentralized governance. 

FUEL – Gearing up for Drift Season 2 Airdrop

In July, Drift unveiled FUEL, a rewards program designed to benefit all types of Drift users, not just active traders. This program will drive Drift’s Season 2 airdrop, further aligning incentives across the community.

Drift at Breakpoint 

In September, the Drift team attended Breakpoint 2024 in Singapore, creating an experience for Drift’s biggest traders and believers with staked DRIFT — supercar rides across the city to side events. 

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A Glimpse into 2025

Drift is evolving into a Super Protocol, uniting five financial primitives — Borrow/Lend, Derivatives, Prediction Markets, AMM, and Wealth Management — under a single permissionless financial platform.

Expect innovations that will:

• Simplify user onboarding, making Drift accessible to non-crypto natives.
• Unlock new use cases for Drift’s financial primitives.
• Empower builders with tools for the next generation of DeFi applications on Solana. 

Drift’s vision remains steadfast: making generational wealth accessible to all.